The Labyrinth and the Dancing Floor

Dark Mountain Project at Dartington

Schumacher College is nestled at the bottom of Dartington Estate just outside Totnes in Devon. It is surrounded by woodlands, herb gardens, fields of vegetables and fruit trees, all cradled by the river Dart. The estate also includes the big house, a beautiful formal garden, a café and pub, cinema, event spaces, and an eclectic architectural mix of buildings housing students, residents, visitors, and organisations. I lived near Dartington on and off for ten years. I knew a little of the interesting things happening there but didn’t realise the fascinating extent of the work was being done until I spent five days on a residential short course with the Dark Mountain Project. Becoming part of Dartington, if only a few days, opened the door to a world of wonder that I wanted to stay in for far longer.

Dartington House and Gardens

Schumacher College growing fields

I was meant to go on the course last year. I had applied for and received funding from the artist network and had it all booked, only to get Covid for the first-time days before the course started. Thankfully, Dartington where kind to me and kept my money safe with the box office until a new Dark Mountain course was announced. A year after I was originally meant to attend, I was given a key to a bedroom and guided down to the Old Postern where the course was being taught.

My cave for the week

The Old Postern

I had very little idea of what I was walking into. Despite choosing the course I didn’t really know who Dark Mountain were, and the timetable hadn’t been sent out before our arrival. Not that the timetable would have really shed much light on proceedings as it said things like ‘losing your way exercise’ and ‘group exercise with combined thread’.  

Thankfully I wasn’t the only one without a clue. On Monday afternoon when the course started almost every one of the 20 attendees was nervous, excited, unsure, and curious. Some knew Dark Mountain, some didn’t. Some knew Dartington, some didn’t. Everyone was willing to dive in, to share, to be part of the group and the mysterious teaching about to unfold.

So, what had I walked into? What was the course?

Those questions are tricky to answer and will require more than this one letter. This week allow me to begin the unravelling, walking with, and weaving in what I learned. Before we get to that though, let’s start with some context.

The Dark Mountain Project are a cultural creative network centred around the Dark Mountain Journal. Born from a manifesto published in 2009 it has become a collaborative community that encourages ‘walking away from the stories that our societies like to tell themselves, the stories that prevent us seeing clearly the extent of the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that is now underway.’ Instead, Dark Mountain makes ‘art that doesn’t take the centrality of humans for granted’ and looks ‘for other stories, ones that helps us make sense of a time of disruption and uncertainty.’

Those ideas came together during the course through our conversations and workshops, as we explored ecology, journeys, stories, the climate, creativity, and spiritual belief. The greatest and most important message of the week for me was the idea of embodied practice. It is a beautiful and complex phrase, and one I know I have only just begun to understand. I know that it is a thread I will be following and sharing with you all.

So much of what we did was encompassed within the course name: The Labyrinth and the Dancing Floor.

A labyrinth made by the Schumacher College students

The Labyrinth is a story, a myth full of meaning and history. A labyrinth is a manmade structure. In the myth it houses the Minotaur and is a prison. It has come to be a symbol of a sacred or perilous journey, of facing our shadow or dark selves, of journeying in and journeying back. The dancing floor is the deep journey. Perhaps it is the dancing floor we come to after the journey through the labyrinth is complete. Or perhaps we can unravel the labyrinth entirely and reveal the dancing floor beneath. Either way it is a space of connection where the journey is not a defined path but the dance of life.

Journeys and journeying were a huge part of the course. One of my favourite activities was gifted to me by Nick Hunt- the practice of slow walking. Slow walking is what it sounds like, walking so slowly that if someone watched they would barely notice your movement. It is also far more than that. You stand barefoot on the earth, look ahead to the land you are walking in, aware of everything in your vision right up to the very peripheries, then you walk epically slowly. The process was transformative for me. My breathing deepened, my mind slowed, tears rolled almost continuously down my cheeks. I got slower and slower as time went on, until it took three deep breaths before I lifted a single foot from the floor. I felt, and still feel, changed.

The woods at Dartington

I have had an important relationship with walking my entire life, and particularly in the last six years, since I began walking for my art. But slow walking was something else, it was different. I felt closer and more aware of the world of which I am a part. I was aware of things I hadn’t been aware of before.

One of the differences was walking barefoot. I used to walk barefoot, right through my childhood, through my teens and into early adulthood I shunned shoes as much and as often as I could. My Mum used to get worried calls from her friends after they spotted me walking barefoot through Camden and Kentish Town. Shoes simply felt wrong. When I started wearing them it wasn’t because they suddenly felt right, it was because my knees had been hurt and I needed shoe support. Walking barefoot once more reminded me of why I did it and what I got from it. It reminded me of the haptic intelligence to be found from the touch of our feet upon the earth, the ambulatory intelligence to be found from journeying with a physical connection to the life around us.

There is a Nan Shepherd quote in her incredible book The Living Mountain, ‘my eyes were in my feet’. Those words could not feel truer. But it is not only my eyes, my heart and my imagination are also in my feet. Stepping out, journeying slowly, I was reminded of this. I found my feet once more.

At the end of course Nick raised the essential idea that a journey isn’t over when you reach your destination. The destination isn’t an end, it is a mid-point for we must journey back. There is only one way in and one way out of the Labyrinth, you must retrace your steps, travelling just as far to return as you did to get to the heart of your journey. It is during the journey back that you find time to understand what you have learned and carry it into your life. That is true of any journey, including going on a course like this one. I have a return journey to make, one that will allow me to build what I learned into my daily life and be stronger and more able to continue on into my next journey because of it.

Because the return isn’t the end of the journey either, it is preparation for the next stepping out, the next adventure, the next walk.

Thank you for being on this journey with me. I am looking forward to sharing more from The Labyrinth and the Dancing Floor with you next week, when I will bring you stinging nettles and the utterly embodied practice my hands and heart where gifted by Caroline Ross.

The river Dart